Majority Leader Schumer Floor Remarks On The Threat To Our Democracy Posed By The Big Lie And Republican Voter Suppression Laws And The Urgent Need For The Senate To Pass Voting Rights Legislation
Washington, D.C. – Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) today spoke on the Senate floor regarding how the same Big Lie that led to the January 6th Insurrection is driving voter suppression laws across the country, exclaiming that the Senate must act to protect our democracy. Below are Senator Schumer’s remarks, which can also be viewed here:
“To understand political power right, and derive it from its original, we must consider, what state all men are naturally in, and that is, a state of perfect freedom to order their actions, and dispose of their possessions and persons, as they think fit, within the bounds of the law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the will of any other person.”
John Locke published these words in England anonymously—anonymously—exactly one hundred years before the Constitution of the United States came into effect. A very, very long time ago, at least to the human mind.
They were published in an era not of Republics but of Kingdoms. Not of Presidents but of Monarchs. Not of Citizens, but rather subjects.
It was an era when many argued for, and took up arms for, the idea that the king derived power from the decrees of Heaven. And here John Locke said no – political power in fact comes from free individuals.
These words were circulated for years in secret, in secret, because to hold these views back then was treason. Locke went further: “The natural state is also one of equality in which all power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, and no one has more than another. It is evident that all human beings…are equal amongst themselves.”
These words, these ideas, a third of a millennia old, but its right there staring us in the face: all men and women are naturally free, and all men and women are naturally equal.
I’ll admit this is lofty stuff. But history lessons matter.
Because these ideas were the initial blueprints for a different sort of political order that would take shape here in this continent, articulated a century later in the words of the American Declaration of Independence.
These were the original ideas for what would inspire the framers to create not a kingdom, but a republic, a democratic society, a place where people equal in rank decide their own leaders in free and fair elections.
It reminds me of the words of James Madison as well: “Who are to be the electors of the federal representatives? Not the rich, more than the poor; not the learned, more than the ignorant; not the haughty heirs of distinguished names. The electors are to be the great body of the People of the United States.”
That’s the noble side of our early history, worthy of remembering and perusing to this day.
There is of course a more complicated, more frustrating reality—one we should not be afraid to admit and to recognize. And one we hide from—or worse, try to erase—at our own peril.
We all know that when our country was founded, mass participation in representative government might have been the object of the founders, but it certainly was not a practice.
Immediately excluded were 700,000 enslaved men and women, counted as three-fifths of a person for the purpose of congressional allotment, but zero-fifths of a person for all other matters of human dignity.
Women, too, were left out.
Also cast aside and brutalized were those who lived on this continent for thousands of years before the colonial era, for whom full participation in political life in practicality has never, never, truly been made real even till today.
And through it all, through it all, voting requirements were left to the states to choose for themselves, so that depending on which side of a state boundary you lived on, a different set of rules might apply to you determining your worthiness to choose your own leaders.
So despite Madison’s sentiments, at the time of our Constitution’s ratification, you had to be a white, male, oftentimes Protestant, landowner to vote. By the election of 1800, barely more than 1 in 10 Americans were even eligible to vote. Of the sixteen states then in the Union, all but three limited suffrage to property holders or taxpayers.
And here is another truth too: despite all that, the story of democracy in America has been a long march, a very long tortuous march, towards universal suffrage.
In America, our holy struggle has been to take these words of our framers—to take the idea that everyone should live freely and equally—and to make it real in whatever way the people can make it real. It’s an exercise in making better what was once woefully imperfect, of having hope that we can make even more progress in the future.
Indeed, this is written into the very, very first statement of our constitution: making a more perfect union.
So from the get-go, generations of Americans have sought to truly establish the United States as a full democracy. We fought a bloody civil war to end slavery. Women organized and reached for the ballot. The civil rights movement brought an end to the vicious segregation of the mid-20th Century.
And here in Congress, yes in this Congress, we passed the Voting Rights Act, the National Voter Registration Act, and the 14th, 15th, 19th, 23rd, 24th and 26th amendments to expand the franchise until there were no more boundaries.
Now we all know, unfortunately, the march has not always been linear. Throughout our nation’s history, moments of significant progress have been followed by reactionary backlash. That backlash takes many forms—white supremacy, tyranny, demagoguery, fear, and political violence and much, much more.
Today it lives largely on the internet, in the dark corners of online places that deal not in truth but in conspiracies that I would call wacky or bizarre if they weren’t so darned dangerous. It also lives, sadly, in the cascade of deranged propaganda we see emanating from certain cable news networks.
Unfortunately it seems—led by one party, compelled by the most dishonest president in history—we are entering another one of those dark periods.
That is what we are talking about here today, on the Senate floor.
If there is anything else besides free and fair elections that have been central to our national political character, it’s been our largely unbroken fidelity to the peaceful transfer of power.
You can’t talk about voting rights and free and fair elections and democracy without also presupposing that the leaders are willing to step down when their terms are over, when they've lost elections.
Thankfully our leaders have by and large honored this tradition, whether that has been in victory or in defeat.
Nobody likes losing, but sometimes you have to move on. That’s life.
But, then came Donald Trump.
Like many before him, Trump ran for re-election in 2020 and lost his race. In fact, he lost to Joe Biden by 7 million votes and 74 Electoral College votes.
I shouldn’t have to say that, but that is the truth and sometimes the truth gets distorted around here.
But rather than accept defeat—rather than follow in the noble tradition of those who came before him—Donald Trump rejected the results of the 2020 election and claimed, without a shred of evidence, without any evidence, that the election was rigged. That it was stolen. That it was a con-job unlike anything we’ve ever seen before.
He planted the seeds of that lie long before the election even happened. Yes, the Big Lie was born then.
The Big Lie is just that—a lie!
It's a lie. It's not a misinterpretation. It's not one person looks at it one way, one person looks at it the other, as some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle want us to believe. It's just a lie.
To this day there is not a shred of evidence supporting the fantasy that Donald Trump won the election, only to have it stolen from him. As a general principle, an extraordinary claim should come with extraordinary proof.
We haven’t seen anything close to proof in the fourteen-or-so months since the 2020 election.
On the other side of the aisle, the biggest, biggest, loudest talkers about the election being stolen have not presented any facts. It's appalling.
So let’s examine the record.
First, Donald Trump has had plenty of chances to prove his allegations in the court of law. In virtually every instance, he has failed.
Let me read an excerpt from USA Today, published last year on the day of the insurrection.
“The president and his allies have filed 62 lawsuits in state and federal courts seeking to overturn election results in states that the president lost…”
A little further it reads “Out of the 62 lawsuits filed challenging the presidential election, 61 have failed.”
Sixty-Two lawsuits in a little under two months!
And if that’s not good enough for some people, let me read further from the article:
“Some cases were dismissed,” says
the article, “for lack of standing and others based on the merits
of the voter fraud allegations. The decisions have come from both
Democratic-appointed and Republican-appointed judges – including federal
judges appointed by President Trump.”
So Trump and his allies went to court to try and make the case for voter fraud, and lost virtually at every turn.
Now, let us move from the courts to what actually happened in the states during the 2020 elections.
Across the board, state officials in states both red and blue—and in fact states that ultimately made the difference in the election—all said the same thing: there was no—no—voter fraud.
Here’s what the Republican Secretary of State in Nevada said in April of last year: the state GOP concerns did “not amount to evidentiary support for the contention that the 2020 general election was plagued by widespread voter fraud.”
No voter fraud in Nevada.
In Arizona, Secretary of State Hobbs said last year “There is absolutely no merit to any claims of widespread voter fraud.”
And just this week—just this week—the elections department of Maricopa County—the largest county in Arizona, headed by a Republican—released a 90 page document delivering a point-by-point refusal of claims of voter fraud.
Their conclusion? “The November 2020 General Election [in Arizona] was administered with integrity and the results were accurate and reliable. This has been proven through statutorily required accuracy tests, court cases, hand counts performed by the political parties, and post-election audits.”
No fraud in Arizona.
Let’s turn to Georgia. The Secretary of State in Georgia published an Op Ed in the Washington Post last year to defend his state’s results.
He wrote “Georgia’s voting system has never been more secure or trustworthy.”
They had multiple recounts in Georgia, importuned by Trump supporters. They had a hand recount. The result was the same every time.
No voter fraud in Georgia.
In Pennsylvania, one Pennsylvania Republican legislator said the following about his own party’s efforts to conduct a so-called forensic audit:
“The current attempt to discredit the 2020 election results runs headlong into an unmistakable truth…Donald Trump lost Pennsylvania because Donald Trump received fewer votes.”
No voter fraud in Pennsylvania either.
Wisconsin, the same story:
“Newsweek: GOP-Aligned Group Finds No Evidence of Wisconsin Voter Fraud After 10-Month Investigation”
It reads:
"A close review, including a hand count of roughly 20,000 ballots from 20 wards, uncovered no evidence of fraudulent ballots or widespread voter fraud," the report reads. "Our hand review found that the counts closely matched those reported by the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC). The review found no evidence of fraudulent ballots."
And then we have Michigan, and by now, I expect you know how this is going to end.
Last summer, the GOP—the Republican Controlled State Senate in Michigan—released a much-anticipated report examining allegations of fraud within their own state.
According to the Detroit News: “[the Report’s] main author, Sen. Ed McBroom [a Republican] sa[id] he found "no evidence of widespread or systematic fraud," contradicting months of assertions from some members of his own party, including former President Donald Trump.”
So, let’s just take a moment to review: no voter fraud in Nevada. None in Arizona. Nor in Georgia. Or Pennsylvania. Or Wisconsin. No voter fraud in Michigan.
So it’s clear, the reason Donald Trump is not in office today is because he didn't receive enough votes to win the election. It’s that simple. It’s indisputable.
The courts said so. The states say so. And the facts say so.
Indeed, even Donald Trump’s own Administration said so! A month after the election, it was none other than former Attorney General Bill Barr himself who made clear that the President was lying to the American people.
Here is an interview with the AP, the Associated Press, about a month after the election. Here is a quote: “Barr told the AP that U.S. attorneys and FBI agents have been working to follow up specific complaints and information they’ve received, but “to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”
Bill Barr, Donald Trump's acolyte said that. Months later, Mr. Barr said that “my suspicion all the way was that there was nothing there. It was all BS.” I will note that Mr. Barr used a different word at the end of that quote, which I’m not repeating here.
But this is the Attorney General, the president's acolyte who sided with him, even he said there's no fraud. How can so many people still cling to this? Elected officials, responsible elected officials. They're doing damage, true damage, to our republic. True damage.
I rarely agree with the former attorney general, on this he is on the mark. The Big Lie is BS. BS.
So. let me state once again—though it should hardly need repeating—that the 2020 election was not in dispute.
Donald Trump did not have an election stolen from him. Nothing about 2020 was “rigged” as he says.
But today, today a frightful amount of Americans still believe that what Mr. Trump is saying is true. Tens of millions of Americans. A minority, yes, but a sizable one that cannot be ignored.
That is the Big Lie in a nutshell.
To them it doesn’t matter that there’s no substance to these arguments. To them it doesn’t matter that the President’s own allies have debunked it. They want to believe it anyway and believe it they do.
And Donald Trump, about the most pernicious president we've ever had—not about but rather the most—pernicious president, no president has done this. Well, he understands this. He understood, from the moment the polls closed on Election night, all he had to do was repeat the lie again and again and again…and it would take on a life of its own.
And now, sadly and troublingly, greatly troubling us, troubling the whole country, the Big Lie is poisoning our democracy. Poisoning it.
Conspiracy theories spreading online. Cable News anchors spewing falsehoods and generating a sense of rage among their viewers.
And when the courts refused to back the former President, when the states refused to back him, when some of his own Administration refused to back him, he was left with one last ditch effort to hold on to power: to get the Vice President to reject the results on January 6th.
By now we all know about the dreaded tweet he posted in late December of 2020:
“Big protest in DC on January 6th…be there, will be wild!”
What a sad documentation, this all is, in 21st century America.
It was Donald Trump’s Big Lie that soaked our political landscape in kerosene.
It was Donald Trump’s rally on the mall on January 6th that struck the match.
And then came the fire. And all of us were here one year ago yesterday to watch the fire burn.
Yesterday, many of us spent much of the day recounting what it was like to be here at the Capitol on January 6th.
I want to commend my colleagues for doing so. But it is shameful my Republican colleagues did not come to the floor to speak as well. It was shameful my Republican colleagues did not come to the floor to speak as well. They did not come to the floor. This room was empty on this side of the aisle. January 6th was every bit an attack on them as it was on anyone else. All of us suffer when democracy is assaulted. This is not a party matter.
So, I want to thank my colleagues who did come yesterday to the floor, and to everyone across the Capitol who shared their stories yesterday.
Many of these stories are painful to revisit, but they radiate with the light of truth, and I applaud them all.
Of course, we also pay tribute to all those who put themselves in harm’s way to protect us and protect this building: our Capitol Police, our DC Metro police, our National Guard. They were outnumbered, unprepared, and largely left on their own. But they held the line.
And when rioters cleared out of the building, another wave of heroes came in: the men and women who work as maintenance staff, as technicians. They came in into the night, without complaint and brought the Capitol back to life, so that we were able to continue to count the votes and not let this insurrectionist mob stop American democracy from proceeding forward.
Those who came in represent the best of us. The best of us.
The attack on the US Capitol may have been limited to a single day, the attack on our democracy, unfortunately, has not ceased.
Since last year there have been no outright attempts to storm this building to undo the will of the people, thank God.
But the disease of the Big Lie continues to spread.
Donald Trump has not changed his tune…he keeps insisting that our democracy is rigged and that our elections have been riddled with voter fraud.
He did it as recently as yesterday.
In fact, he was going to have an entire press conference on it, before calling it off. It was reported that his own Republican colleagues didn't want to hear him spew his lies on this day that has become so sacred to so many.
This, what Donald Trump does, is poison.
The consequences of the former president’s words continue to erode our democracy day by day.
And if the enemies of democracy failed to get their way with baseball bats and pipe bombs, they have now turned their focus to a quieter, much more organized effort to subvert our democratic process from the bottom up.
It is in other words, a slow motion insurrection, but equally insidious and ultimately more damaging.
I want to read the following from the AP: “In the weeks leading up to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, a handful of Americans — well-known politicians, obscure local bureaucrats — stood up to block then-President Donald Trump’s unprecedented attempt to overturn a free and fair vote of the American people.
But in the year since, Trump-aligned Republicans have worked to clear the path for next time.
The article continues, “In battleground states and beyond, Republicans are taking hold of the once-overlooked machinery of elections. While the effort is incomplete and uneven, outside experts on democracy and Democrats are sounding alarms, warning that the United States is witnessing a “slow-motion insurrection,” a better chance of success than Trump’s failed power grab last year.
They point to a mounting list of evidence: candidates who deny Trump’s loss are running for offices that could have a key role in the election of the next president in 2024…The efforts are poised to fuel disinformation and anger about the 2020 results for years to come.”
This, is the heart of the matter of why we are here today.
The insurrection that occurred a year ago yesterday is still going on. It may be slow motion, but in all likelihood if we do nothing about it far more damaging to this republic than even the insurrectionists were on the 6th.
It merits repeating again: 2020 was the safest election we’ve had in a long time.
A record number of Americans cast a ballot that year: over 159 million people.
As I’ve said already, there have been no indications that the result was anything less than free, fair, and accurate.
But despite the fact that the 2020 election was free, fair and accurate, in the year following the 2020 election, at least 19 Republican-led legislatures—suddenly!—decided to re-write the rules that govern the way people vote in their respective states.
At least 33 new laws have been passed across the country that will—as I will explain in a moment—have the effect of making it harder to vote, harder to register to vote, and worst of all, potentially empower partisans to arbitrate outcomes of future elections, instead of non-partisan election workers.
Hundreds, hundreds more such laws were proposed that may very well get enacted in the near future particularly if we don’t act.
Now, the Republican Leader has pointed—repeatedly—to the 2020 election as proof that there was no effort to suppress the vote.
This is nothing but a sleight of hand from the Republican Leader—he ignores that the problem today is not about what happened during the 2020 election, it’s what has happened after. So Leader McConnell, when you say there’s no problem in 2020, then why do we need to change it? And why do you ignore all the changes that are occurring after 2020? It’s sophistry!
Let me say that one more time, it’s amazing: the Republican Leader has argued that the 2020 election is proof that there is no effort to suppress the vote in America.
But that’s, but it’s not what happened during the 2020 that we’re arguing. Although Donald Trump calls 2020 the Big Lie. Leader McConnell here is contradicting him although he never does it directly for many different, non-admirable reasons. So, any objective observer will admit that different rules made it harder for people to vote but it’s the great danger, but the danger is not them, it’s what the states have done after the 2020 election. Even though some states tried to do it before.
We need to be very clear: the timing, the sheer volume, and nature of these new election laws is not an innocent coincidence. They didn’t just happen, springing up in each state on it’s own. No!
Over the course of the year, we all kept hearing the same justifications for many of these laws. State Republicans said we need to preserve “Election integrity” over and over again. They said that we need to safeguard against voter fraud.
But, take a look at the actual policies that are now law and tell me if you think they have anything to do with election integrity:
Reducing polling hours and polling places within a state: that’s now the law in Iowa, Montana, and Texas. What does that have to do with election integrity?
Limiting the number, location, or availability of absentee ballot drop boxes: now the law in Georgia, Iowa, Indiana, and Florida. What does that have to do with election integrity?
Making it harder to register—to register—to vote: that’s now law in Texas, Florida, Kansas, Iowa, New Hampshire, and Montana.
Shortening the Window to apply for a mail-in ballot: now the law in states like Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Iowa, and Kentucky.
Increasing the use of risky or potentially faulty voter purges: now the law in Arizona, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Texas, Utah, and New Hampshire.
Increasing barriers for voters with disabilities: that’s now the law in Alabama, Iowa, and Texas, which passed not one but two laws which will have that effect. Telling disabled people it’s going to be harder for you to vote, what does that have to do with election integrity?
Here is an especially egregious one: limiting early voting days or hours. That’s now the law in Georgia, Iowa, and Texas.
And of course, as many have condemned for months, Criminalizing giving food and water to voters waiting in line to vote: that’s now the law in Georgia and Florida. When Republicans say it’s a crime to give a voter some food or water in line, do they think they’re preventing fraud by denying people a snack? That’s kafkaesque. Kafka was writing about the demise of democracy.
Now, in addition to these new laws that are actually on the books, we also need to remember all the proposals that they’ve tried to pass but not have been able to do to date. They tell us all we need to know about the true intentions of these reforms, of these so-called proposed ones.
The most reprehensible were of course the attempts in states like Georgia and Texas to eliminate early voting on Sunday, a day of course when many churchgoing African-Americans participate in voter-drives known as “souls to the polls.” Did they show Sunday voting is more fraudulent than other voting? No, you know what they’re up to.
What an astonishing coincidence! Outlawing voting on a day when African-American churches sponsor get-out-the-vote efforts. Have they shown that using drop-off ballot boxes create more fraud than other? No, these are angled at suppressing certain types of people from voting. Not everybody.
Policies like these do nothing, have nothing to do with election integrity. When you say you can’t vote on Sunday, it’s the same intention of those old restrictions that used to require African Americans to guess the number of jellybeans in a jar before they were allowed to cast a ballot. What regression.
Now of course, our Republican friends, many of them reject these ideas. That’s not a surprise.
But every so often, they speak with astonishing and stunning honesty.
As one state representative in Arizona said when defending his state’s efforts to defended Republican voting: “everybody shouldn’t be voting.” That’s what he said. I wonder who “everyone” was in his eyes.
Indeed he actually said: “we don’t mind putting security measures in that won’t let everybody vote—but everybody shouldn’t be voting.”
And every now and then, the very plain and simple truth from these actors makes its way to the surface.
When you lose an election, you’re not supposed to stop people from voting, even if they didn’t vote for you.
That’s democracy, my Republican friends. That’s democracy.
You lose an election, you’re supposed to try harder and win over the voters you lost.
Instead, Republicans across the country are trying to stop the other side from voting. That tears apart, rips apart, the very fabric of our democracy.
So let’s be abundantly clear: these anti-voter laws are on the books today only, only because their authors cited the Big Lie, and are trying to succeed when the insurrection failed. A slow-motion insurrection, that’s what it was. Equally if not more damaging to our republic.
Disenfranchising millions of Americans is bad enough. But there’s actually another, more sinister component to these laws.
Because Republican’s aren’t just trying to suppress the vote, they’re trying to subvert the vote.
They’re trying to subvert the very machinery of the democratic process itself.
It’s not enough that they make it harder for people to vote, they’re making it more likely that those that do vote could see, God forbid, their ballots called into question, subjected to unwarranted and dangerous scrutiny, and maybe get thrown out entirely.
In states like Arizona, Kansas, Arkansas, Georgia, Republican legislatures are trying to give more power to themselves and other partisan bodies to undermine, override, or neuter bipartisan election boards and county legislature, country election officials.
In a number of states, they have already succeeded.
Last August, a report from ABC News noted that at least ten new state laws have shifted power over elections from non-partisan election officials to “partisan entities.” Non-partisan peoples to partisan entities? Why? Someone needs to figure that out.
Here’s what ABC News said: “Among the dozens of election reform laws changing rules regarding how voters cast ballots, several have also diminished secretaries of states' authority over elections or shifted aspects of election administration to highly partisan bodies, such as state legislators themselves or uneven bipartisan election boards.”
A separate report from Protect Democracy—a nonprofit founded by former White House and DOJ officials—warned last summer: “Many state legislatures are pursuing a strategy to politicize, criminalize, and interfere in an election administration. Their course of action threatens the foundations of fair, professional, and non-partisan elections.”
Let’s go through some of the examples.
In Arizona:
ABC News reported last August under a new law passed by the Republican Legislature, the “Arizona Democratic secretary of state, Katie Hobbs, can no longer represent the state in lawsuits defending its election code. The power now lies exclusively with the Republican attorney general -- but only through Jan. 2, 2023, when coincidentally Hobbs' term ends.”
That’s now the law in Arizona.
In Georgia:
Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger has now been effectively fired from the State Election Board, months after refusing to go along with President Trump’s request to “find enough votes” to secure him a win.
Appalling, my Republican friends. Donald Trump calls up and asks the Secretary of State of his own party to find enough votes. He gets fired and they are all defending him or shrugging their shoulders or putting their heads in the sand. I've never seen anything quite like this.
By the way, for those who don’t know, the State Election Board in Georgia is responsible for, among other things, investigating voter irregularities. Amazing, just amazing.
There are other examples across the country. Let’s turn to Texas:
According to the Voting Rights Lab, a particularly sinister new policy is now the law in that state:
“The recently-enacted election omnibus bill, S.B. 1, prohibits local officials from modifying election procedures to better serve voters. It also increases the likelihood of partisan poll watchers disrupting polling places and ballot verification and counting locations. The bill increased the ability of poll watchers to move freely throughout an election location, including areas containing voters waiting in line, checking in, or casting ballots.
And again, it’s helpful to look at those pernicious proposals that were introduced at the state level but to date have not been enacted to law.
One bill in Arizona would have given flat out the state legislature the authority to cancel the certification of electors by a simple majority vote.
So looking through the record, the conclusion is not in doubt.
Republicans across the board justify these new laws by saying they want to make it easier to vote, but harder to cheat.
But when you are looking at what they’re actually doing, it is perfectly clear that they are doing the opposite. The exact opposite. Making it harder to vote, and easier to steal an election.
And this, my friends, is just the tip of the iceberg. These state legislatures will soon return to session this year and keep going. All importuned by Donald Trump’s Big Lie.
And what’s missing is some profiles in courage – enough profiles in courage. Enough people, whether it's in this Senate chamber, in the House chamber, in the legislatures on the Republican side, saying I want to be a Republican, I want Republicans to win, but I'm not going to stoop to this level of beginning to dismember our democracy.
Let me make a final, crucial, point about what we are seeing playing out in the states.
Everything, everything I just described at the state level is being done on a partisan basis. This is a Republican con-job, with zero efforts being made to get any input from Democrats.
Should state Republican Legislatures keep going—should we in this chamber fail to do something about it or respond with insufficient force—our democracy could very well cross a fatal point of no return.
And then the unthinkable becomes real. Democracy erodes and could—horror of horrors—vanish, as it has in other nations in the course of world history. And what history shows us is when these pernicious activities starts, when a mob starts, when a leader just lies to gain power, if people don't rise up, it happens. America, don't be complacent. This is happening and it's a great danger and in many other countries that devolve to dictatorship it starts in ways similar like this and the majority of good people said, we don't have to worry about it. Well, we do. That's why we're here. That's why Senator Merkley and I and Klobuchar and Durbin and others have taken to the floor today.
So now, what is the way forward?
Do we accept these developments as inevitable? Do we say it’s not so bad?
Do we look away? Do we tell ourselves this dark cloud will pass and that the disease of the Big Lie is going to just cure itself?
We can’t. The risk is too great.
What we must do is remember the words of our
great friend, John Lewis, who shortly before his death said: “When you see
something that is not right, you must say something. You must do something.
Democracy is not a state. It is an act, and each generation must do its part to
help build what we call the Beloved Community…”
Well, today, the Senate is being called to take action.
So as soon as next week, we intend to bring up legislation back to the floor of this chamber to protect our democracy and shore up the right to vote.
Everyone in this chamber will once again have the opportunity to go on record: will Republicans join Democrats in a bipartisan manner to move forward on defending Democracy?
As soon as next week they will be called on to give us an answer and they know the eyes of history are watching. Maybe the few ideologies don’t but must of them do. Most of them do.
And next week, our Republican friends will be called to give us an answer.
If there is any fight that this body should know how to win, it’s protecting our democracy, it’s strengthening our right to vote.
Throughout this chamber’s history—in the aftermath of the civil war, during the 60s, and throughout the second half of the twentieth century—passing voting rights legislation has been one of the Senate’s crowing achievements.
And now, in this moment of peril for democracy, the Senate now needs to work to pass the Freedom to Vote Act.
We need to work to pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
We must get both done so we can send these bills to President Biden’s desk and they be signed into law. Preventing, undoing the pernicious activities that I have documented in the past hour.
For months—for months—we have tried to get our Republican colleagues to join us.
After all, voting rights should not be partisan—it hasn’t been in the past. It has been supported by Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush. Hardly big liberals. Hardly democratic sympathizers. Oh no.
Now, we have tried to continue that bipartisan spirit: we tried no less than four times to begin a simple debate here on the floor about this matter.
We have lobbied our Republicans friends privately; we have gone through regular order; we have attempted to debate them on the floor.
We have presented reasonable, commonsense proposals in June, August, October, and November.
Each time, each time I personally promised my Republican colleagues and my Democratic colleagues, particularly the two who have some doubts that they would have ample opportunities to voice their concerns, offer germane amendments, and make changes to our proposals.
At no point did we ever ask our Republican friends to vote for our legislation…we’ve simply been asking them to begin debating, just as the Senate was intended to do.
Off the floor, we held public hearings, group discussions with Senators, and one-on-one meetings with the other side to try to win some support. Senators Manchin and Kaine and Tester and King and Durbin and Klobuchar and Leahy, and many more have all met with Republicans to initiate a dialogue.
At every turn, we have been met with resistance.
Next week we will try again, they will go on record again.
But of course obstruction is all we have been able to see so far.
As an aside, one of the arguments we hear from the other side is that this is this is an attempt at a “federal takeover” of our elections. The sophistry, the dishonesty is legion.
The Founders—who my Republican colleagues invoke when it’s time to confirm a right-wing judge—wrote in the Constitution that the Congress precisely has the power to pass laws to determine the time, place and manner of federal elections. This is nothing new. We've done it over and over again with amendments and with legislation. Bipartisan.
The problem isn’t simply they oppose our proposals for voting rights legislation; they now even refuse to support legislation they embraced in the past, including the policies in the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act.
Remember, the Voting Rights Act was reauthorized five times through its history, including by Presidents Nixon, Reagan, and Bush.
Many of my Republican colleagues have worked in past to improve preclearance provisions similar to the ones contained in our latest proposal.
It was good enough for Republicans back then. Republicans who were true conservatives. It should be good enough for our Republican friends today.
But they won’t even support that. In fact, they
won’t even support a vote to open a debate.
The sole exception in ten months has been our colleague, the Senator from Alaska, once on four votes.
But where is the rest of the party of Abraham Lincoln?
Down to the last member, the rest of the Republican Conference has refused to engage, refused to debate, even refused to acknowledge that our country faces a serious threat to democracy.
Leader McConnell this week seemed to refer to the laws I talked about earlier as “mainstream” here on the floor.
What is he talking about? Maybe they are mainstream in failed democracies, but they are unacceptable in the United States.
So, it is clear that the modern Republican Party has turned its back on protecting voting rights.
The party of Lincoln is increasingly becoming the party of the Big Lie. Not just Donald Trump, but just about everybody here, with a rare exception.
So, the Senate is better than this.
A simple look at our history shows we are better than this.
The same institution that passed Civil Rights Legislation, the New Deal, the Great Society, and the bills of Reconstruction which should be more than capable of defending democracy in the modern era.
But today, the partisanship and the Big Lie, the looming specter of Donald Trump and his vindictiveness, his dishonesty is a shadow that's cast over this entire chamber and leads to the gridlock we have.
This chamber is not capable of functioning when one side’s strategy for legislation is inflexible, total, unthinking, unwilling to admit fact and actually making up lies to buttress the Big Lie, such as the federal government shouldn't be involved in how federal offices are voted for.
The Senate is no longer a cooling saucer—it is a deep freezer.
Anyone who has been here for more than a few years knows the gears of Senate have ossified. The filibuster is used far more today than ever before—by some measures ten times as much compared to decades past.
Let me say it again: by some measures the filibuster is used as much as ten times today compared to decades past. My colleague from Oregon is an expert on this.
Some might wonder if any of the great accomplishments of the past would have a chance of passage today.
Would the Social Security Act pass the modern Senate? Medicare and Medicaid? Civil Rights?
We sure hope they would, but it is difficult to see that with the way this chamber works today.
As I have said since the fall, if this sort of obstruction will continue, I believe the Senate needs to be restored to its rightful status as the world’s greatest deliberative body.
It was that in the past, it is certainly, certainly not that now.
It earned that title precisely because, yes, debate is a central feature of this body and always will be.
But at the end of the day, so is governing.
So is taking action, when needed, once the debate has run its due course.
This is an old, old fight in this chamber. Over 100 years ago, the great Senator of Massachusetts, Henry Cabot Lodge, said that “to vote without debating is perilous, but to debate and never vote is imbecile.”
To vote without debating is perilous, but to debate and never vote is imbecile.
We should heed those words today, and Democrats are currently exploring the paths we have available to restore the Senate so it does what the framers intended: debate, deliberate, comprise, and vote.
As I said in my Dear Colleague earlier this week, if Republicans continue to hijack the rules of the chamber to prevent us from protecting our Democracy, then the Senate will debate and consider changes to the rules on or before January 17, Martin Luther King Jr. Day.
As we hold this debate I ask my colleagues to consider this question: If the right to vote is the cornerstone of our democracy, then how can Democrats permit a situation in which Republicans can pass voter suppression laws at the State level with only a simple majority vote, but not allow the United States Senate to do the same?
This asymmetry cannot hold. If Senate Republicans continue to abuse the filibuster to prevent this body from acting, then I would plead with the Senate—particularly my colleagues on this side of the aisle—to adapt.
And we must adapt for the sake of our democracy, so we can pass the legislation I talked about earlier.
Now, as I near the end of my remarks, let me again appeal to an important moment from history:
In the aftermath of the Civil War—and as the Nation began the colossal work of Reconstruction—America was more divided than at any point in history. I'm reading Grant's biography now, that’s clear.
It was hard to imagine that a single nation could endure after the bloody conflict of the previous four years.
At the time, the Congress set to work on granting newly-freed slaves the basic freedoms that had long been denied to them. Back then it was the party of Lincoln—which a century-and-a-half later bears little resemblance to what we see among their ranks today.
These freedoms were eventually enshrined federally in the 14th and 15th amendments, granting due process and the right to vote to all citizens regardless of color or race.
Today, these amendments rank as some of the greatest and most revered accomplishments in Congressional history.
They are proof that our country is capable of living up to its founding promise, if—if we are willing to put in the work.
But at the time, the minority party in both chambers refused to offer a single vote, a single vote for any one of the civil rights legislation put forward during Reconstruction. Not. One. Vote. Not. One. Vote.
They argued these bills represented nothing more than the partisan interests of the majority--a power grab, if you will, from vengeful northerners.
But that didn’t stop the majority.
If basic freedoms meant going it alone, they knew they had to do it.
To the patriots after the civil war, this wasn’t partisan—it was patriotic.
And the American Democracy is better off today because the patriots in this chamber at that time were undeterred by minority obstruction.
On this day—the day after we mark the one year anniversary of an armed insurrection at the US Capitol, rooted in a Big Lie that is eroding our democracy—the question before the Senate is how we will find a path forward on protecting our freedoms in the 21st century.
Members of this body now face a choice—they can follow in the footsteps of our patriotic predecessors in this chamber.
Or they can sit by just as the segregationist-oriented Democrats in the post-civil war era did and try to have democracy unravel. I do not believe that we want our democracy to unravel.
I do not believe that is the ultimate destiny of this country. It is a grand country. As the founding fathers called it, God's noble experiment.
I believe, I truly believe, our democracy will long endure against these latest attacks.
I believe that because of what I said at the very beginning of my remarks, the history of this country is a long march towards expanding our democracy, towards making more perfect what our founders sought to establish.
It took millions of Americans hundreds of years to make this country what it is today: Americans of every age and color and creed who marched and protested, who stood up and sat in; Americans who died defending democracy in its darkest and lowest hours.
On Memorial Day in 1884, Oliver Wendell Holmes told his war-weary audience that “whether [one] accepts from Fortune her spade, and will look downward and dig, or from Aspiration her axe and cord, and will scale the ice, the one and only success which it is [yours] to command is to bring to [your] work a mighty heart.”
I have confidence that Americans of a different generation, our generation—and those of us in this chamber—will bring to our work a mighty heart: to fight for what’s right, to fight for the truth, to never lose faith, and to protect the precious gift handed down to us by the framers.
And by the grace of God, I know that our democracy shall not perish in this hour but rather endure today, tomorrow, for generations to come
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